Document Type

Honors Project

Publication Date

6-10-2026

Abstract

This paper aims to expand on the various theories of socialist utopianism first put forward by Hegel and Marx, and later expanded by Frederic Jameson, through a comparative analysis of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur (1928). While Morris presents a coherent and optimistic vision of a post-capitalist society, where labor, art, and daily life are harmoniously integrated, Platonov’s destabilizes this vision, depicting a fragmented and ambiguous utopia shaped by revolutionary upheaval and competing philosophical influences. These two polarities of what the utopian novel can look like have both been underappreciated and misunderstood for very different reasons, and neither fits cleanly into the framework of utopia that Jameson puts forward. This paper thus argues that these two books can be better elucidated by reading them against each other, and through this reading, their place in the ‘utopian canon’ can be made clearer.

Level of Honors

summa cum laude

Department

Education

Advisor

Timothy Spurgin

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